The highly-touted Six Strikes anti-piracy policy involving major US internet providers has been fully enacted nearly two years after Hollywood copyright enforcers dreamt up the scheme, according to a new announcement from the group behind the plan.

Rick Cotton, the head of the US Chamber of Commerce’s
anti-counterfeiting and piracy department, said Wednesday that
the program had been delayed, although April will be the second
month that suspected Internet pirates are sent warnings about
their behavior.

As part of the Six Strikes policy (which AT&T, Cablevision,
Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon have agreed to follow) the five
major internet service providers (ISPs) said they intend to
notify a user when their computer was used to illegally download
media content. The plan is a reversal or at least an alternative
to the mostly failed effort to scare downloaders out of pirated
music and movies by making headlines with large settlement
lawsuits.

“The last year has been a ramp-up…March is the first month
those [notices] are going out to full capacities,” Cotton
said at a Copyright Alert System (as the Six Strikes plan is
officially known) event, as quoted by GigaOm.

He claimed that, as the system has been enacted, piracy has been
reduced, although he did not mention any specific evidence. Much
of the policy’s genesis and implementation have been shrouded in
secrecy, with the ISPs refusing to disclose how many notices they
have sent out so far. A recent TorrentFreak article reported that Comcast
alone has issued more than 625,000 alerts.

Cotton also did not describe the program’s most severe
punishment, which culminates with an ISP slowing down a
customer’s Internet speed (known as throttling) to a crawl after
they have received a number of increasingly stern warnings to
avoid piracy.

“There’s an enormous fall-off when people get the first
notice,” he said. “The vast majority of people say they
stop when they receive the notice.”

Whether the Six Strikes plan is a viable solution to piracy
remains to be seen, although skepticism has surrounded the
program since it was first announced in 2012. Early reports
suggested that ISP executives were hesitant to enter into the
agreement with major Hollywood studios and record company
bigwigs.

The initiative then faced a backlash from customers who feared
that they would have their Internet connection slashed, an
especially frustrating idea when some suggested that they could
be implicated by an actual pirate who hacked their WiFi
connection.

The plan’s designers admitted the plan is not fool-proof, with
Cotton confessing that “piracy will never go away,”
while sticking to the notion that the plan here is to instead
educate the public about piracy.

A number of scientific reports published in recent years have
suggested that, instead of threatening punishment, content
providers should consider making music, movies, games, and
software more attainable with streaming content and lower prices.

Ipsos MMI, a Norwegian research body, revealed last year that an
estimated 1.2 billion songs were pirated in Norway in 2008,
although that figure dropped to just 210 million four years
later. In that time Norway passed an anti-piracy law of its own,
although the researchers specifically credited the rise of direct
streaming services like Spotify, Netflix, and the like.

“When you have a good legitimate offer, the people will use
it,” Olav Torvund, a former law professor at the University
of Oslo, told the Telegraph. “There is no excuse for
illegal copying, but when you get an offer that does not cost too
much and is easy to use, it is less interesting to download
illegally.”